Set against the Caucasus, at the crossroads of Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian imperial power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Camera Caucasica shows that photographs are the product of complex networks of cultural traditions, political developments, and economic processes. The book tells the stories of Italian mountaineers, Austrian art historians, Swedish oil barons, Georgian nurses, Armenian court photographers, and Russian anthropologists—individuals who together shaped the development of photography in the Caucasus. By centering on cross-border collaboration and entanglement, Camera Caucasica presents not only the history of photography but also the history of the region itself, bringing a seemingly peripheral area into the heart of a global field of research.
